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When I was four or five, my dad took some spare lumber and lathed me a toy rifle. I look back and can’t quite fix memory’s eye on the thing, but my hand remembers that the stock was comfortable and I do remember looking down the wooden barrel and shooting imaginary bullets. The bullets hit people, dogs, the house, passing cars, trees, birds. I went pow. Later, my parents did not buy us kids lots of toy guns. They were noisy. We did get water pistols, and I remember a pistol cap gun with a holster. But in comparison with our friends in the suburbs of Atlanta, we were not well stocked with toy arms. We played with theirs. And then stopped. At no point did my parents talk with us about the real possibility that, with a toy pistol in our toy holster, we might be mistaken by the cops for a real killa and given a split second to prove that wasn’t the case before we were beaded with pistol shot – the real stuff this time. No, that didn’t come up. What does that show? It shows that the